NetLeaders advocates in Dubai last weekend were treated to some spectacular announcements concerning the immediate future of the DasEcosystem. In this, our first blog reflecting on the Leadership Summit, we have compiled a bitesize digest of the 12 most important strategic projects going forward.

1) NETLEADERS GETS A LAS VEGAS LIFT IN 2018
A NetLeaders USA office operating out of Las Vegas is due to be opened in 2018 while a major global leadership event will be scheduled for the summer in the Nevada city often described as the entertainment capital of the world. John Pretto, Director of NetLeaders, said: “I’ve had about five people working out of my house for the past six months and my wife kicked us out so were forced to rent an office! We got the keys to a new office last Friday and we are excited to have it in preparation for the 2018 launch of NetLeaders USA. We’re very excited also to announce a big event in June 2018. It will be a global leadership event. We are finalising the property we are going to stay at and it’s going to be absolutely amazing. So come vist us in the office in Las Vegas and have a fantastic time!”

2) PREMIERE OF THE DASCOIN VISION FILM
A specially commissioned short film charting the personal journey and core beliefs of DasCoin Founder and CEO Michael Mathias was shown to wrapt delegates in Dubai. It was unveiled by James Elston, Vice President of Marketing, NetLeaders. James told leaders: “Our brand strategy we hope is simple: it’s to earn people’s trust, increase love for the brand and become the currency of choice by building our character, our integrity, our intent, our motivations for what it is we do and our competence. I can’t over-emphasise how proud we are as a marketing team of everyone involved in creating the first bit of content which has taken some time to do and I hope does service to the motivations, the reasons behind the emergence, crystallisation and everything else behind this company.”

3) A FUTURE BUILT ON THREE SEPARATE NETWORKS
Michael outlined a new approach in which the DasEcosystem would be underpinned by a triumvirate of equally important and influential networks: The first of these was explained as “the network of technology on which we can organise this whole thing, and we call that DasCloud – that’s the servers, all the technology nodes in our network. Then we have the customers and the advocates, that’s a very important network of people and that’s NetLeaders, and we also have the beginnings of our partners network, our EcoPartners: this is an alliance with entities and institutions which we call DasInternational. To go where we want to go all of these things need to expand. When you look back a year ago and look where we are now and look what’s happening we have grown a ton in a year since the last time we were here in Dubai but now we want to focus on what the next year is.”

4) THE ADVENT OF DASFOUNDATION, VOTING NODES AND DASCHAINS
Michael said DasFoundation, which has a largely ethical standpoint, is going to be “at the heart of everything we are doing.” He explained: “DasFoundation has an incredible mission to continue and build on the beginnings of what we are doing in our business and take it to the next level. We are going to put up Blockchain technology for nations around the world, taking unusable land and applying innovative restoration. We want to make this whole thing better and this foundation is going to be at the heart of everything we are going to be doing.” He then went on to explain the arrival of enhanced democracy via “voting nodes” within the ecosystem. “People with a certain level of holding will be voting on proposals, they’ll vote on what changes to bring in. It’s an important change to the environment. It will be a very vibrant community and we need your voices.” Both these proposals attracted plenty of applause from delegates, so too did the announcement of DasChains. In essence these will be bespoke Blockchains built from within the DasEcosystem which EcoPartners can use to operate their businesses. Michael said: “This platform can be used for all manner of ICOs and we can launch the first ones next year. These include utility tokens, which are a new realm, and security tokens which are more for accredited investors. We are working with some very interesting people around unlocking and tokenising illiquid assets on our Blockchain. We believe the real story is in utility tokens because that’s opening things up to non-accredited investors. That realm is where anybody can put any amount of money in; it’s not restricted to any levels of wealth. We don’t want to lock people out of participating in these things.” He continued: “Our network is going to grow so fast this year that other businesses are going to want to share in our community and that’s a way of strengthening our network. We have a consortium model that is optimised to run dedicated Blockchains very cost-effectively for a wide, wide spectrum of different applications. These include business and consumer apps, and we are going to launch them next year.”

5) QUANTUM PROOFING
Building up protection against the threat of quantum computing is also at the forefront of the DasEcosystem. Michael said: “We’re doing a lot of research and we want to be at the forefront of this. People are always talking about quantum computing, saying all this cryptocurrency is great but what about modern computing and how can that ruin the party? We have the ability to respond very quickly. We have a lot more deployment control than an open system and we have been doing some preliminary work in this field. We can be very assured of a quantum-proof future. We are going to be doing quantum-proof computing, there are also quantum-proof encoded algorithms that use techniques like lattice encryption to ensure quantum computing is not effective against us.”

Las Vegas, where NetLeaders USA is to be based will host a major leadership event in June 2018

6) OBTAINING ADDED VALUE VIA THE DASECOSYSTEM
Terry O’Hearn, Director of DasFinancial, told leaders that the global expansion of Blockchain and its wider adoption outside cryptocurrency could unlock real value for the DasEcosystem. He said: “You can transfer value through Blockchain very easily. You can store value. This is going to grow exponentially over the next few years. A lot of new banking products will be introduced – both in pure cryptocurrency and hybrid models. Land Value is an opportunity to do a lot of special things. We have been talking about that in terms of helping in Africa, but it will be growing right up to commercial loans and mortgages. Insurance and managing risk is one of the most inefficient sectors quietly operating under the radar: there’s an opportunity to save 30% to 50% very easily by cutting out the middle man and doing things more efficiently with Blockchain and smart contracts. we are going to see that industry disrupted and there will be big opportunities.” He said DasFinancial would look at ways of bringing value to members, such as car insurance at half its retail cost, while sustained growth in the network “can bring value to all of us in several different ways.” He added: “If there’s something we can do that could have a positive impact on price appreciation we will do it. There are things we can do which will elevate the demand for DasCoin and that will be good for all of us and will have the knock-on effect of providing liquidity.”

7) THIRD-PARTY CHECKLIST
When a business from outside seeks to do business with DasCoin, it will have to meet a series of criteria, to be known as the “third-party checklist”. Terry explained: “We need to make sure that whatever entity is coming in is providing value to the system. It doesn’t have to be just be financial, there are social aspects and many other ways of providing value. Does it provide utility for the ecosystem? What can we do with it? Is the application/business/product or service legal? We will ask these questions and will be doing what we can to make sure that illegal activities aren’t conducted on our network. There are other networks out there and when you have a platform which is open to illegal activities it erodes trust. We have earned trust over time. Has the architect of the application/business/product developed a firm business plan? We want to make sure they’ve done their homework.”

8) PATHWAY TO THE PUBLIC EXCHANGE
Terry was keen to stress that a “tremendous amount of activity” is taking place to ensure DasCoin is ready to trade on public exchanges by the end of March 2018 and outlined a series of milestones and deadlines put in place between now and then to ensure readiness. He said there would be a third-party entity enlisted to serve as a clearing platform to carry out the transactions. He explained: “We are deep into discussions with a deeply professional team who will be able to operate the exchange and this will be finalised by the end of this year. He said he would be working directly with a team in Belgrade ahead of the public exchange launch. Terry added: “There will be other digital assets and fiat currencies on the exchange and we will do a soft launch in Q1. We have no date on that yet because there too many variables but probably in Rio [January] we should have a date for the soft launch. I think the date for London [main public exchange launch] has been moved to March 24 and we will hopefully have more than one exchange by then.”

9) DASPAY ON TRACK TO LAUNCH IN 2018
“I know there are a lot of questions and about what is happening to DasPay,” said Terry. “Our mobile payment solution is going to be the first payment solution where you are actually spending cryptocurrency; others use a pre-pay version where you are loading the card and you are actually using fiat currency. In this one you are really spending DasCoin. It’s the most advanced mobile solution and there is no change for the merchant to worry about so it’s super easy for them to accept it. DasPay is one of the main reasons for people joining the network: it’s really important we keep growing the network as much as possible.” Terry earmarked December 20 as a key date for sharing further DasPay information, when he will be appearing on John Pretto’s weekly webcast. “Subject to some answers we are still waiting for we’ll be able to talk in more detail about the ICO itself. We’ll be aiming to launch DasPay, and we’re still on track, in the second quarter of 2018. We’re going to work on liquidity. It’s dependent on our exchange having good liquidity because we ping the exchange for a real-time exchange rate and if there’s not good volume it’s not going to get good information and DasPay won’t be working like we want it to work so we want to grow the network and help create that volume and liquidity. We’re very optimisitic about it but everybody here can participate in that growth.”

10) SARCEVICH BULLISH ON WEBWALLET’S FUTURE
George Sarcevich, Director of WebWallet, believes 2017 has been an “incredible year” in the digital asset world in general with WebWallet enjoying “an even more incredible year”. Volume on the DasExchange has increased through the wider distribution of validators but growth would be controlled. “As we add new functions to the system we try to adhere to the WebWallet design principals. We try to have a minimalist easy-to-understand user interface and we want to be compliant across jurisdictions. One year ago there were 8% as many Google searches for DasCoin as there are today. I expect this trend to continue greatly. The mission statement that motivates us is this: Today’s hyper-connected world merits a trusted financial partner, adapted to your needs, giving you control and constantly pushing you forward. WebWallet inspires, guides and empowers every person to control their finances using sophisticated financial utilities presented as simple, secure applications through a familiar connected ecosystem.” The WebWallet marketplace has an important future too. “It’s going to be a place that will add additional utility to your Cycles not only will you submit your Cycles to create DasCoin you will be able to submit them for other services you will be able to pay for with your Cycles. There will be a lot of exciting developments in the coming year and we look forward to building it all with you.”

11) A NEW CUSTOMER SERVICE HUB IN MALAYSIA
Pavle Lekic, in charge of customer service at DasCoin, revealed that his group are in the final stages of preparing a secondary support centre in Kuala Lumpur, specifically to support the Asian market. “This will be dedicated to markets like China, Malaysia, Vietnam, Japan and communicate with customers in their native languages.” The addition of this centre to complement the existing customer service hub in Belgrade will provide extra benefits. “There will be more live chat coverage, very close to 24-hour coverage, and we will improve the e-mail response time.” The Belgrade offices will be staffed by 26 support agents by the end of the year. The options to access customer service are e-mail or live chat. And either way, customer service is provided through a ticketing system. Pavle said: “It’s a pretty standard tool to be used in a customer service environment. Every chat you start with us creates a ticket in our system, essentially a thread. Once we receive your inquiry it helps us in a variety of ways, it helps us see the customer history. Every time you contact us, we don’t delete anything, we want to know what the customer’s experience is. It allows us also to measure statistics.”

12) UNDERSTANDING AND SELLING THE BRAND
Ed Rosso, Brand Manager of Marketing at NetLeaders, announced a number of major updates in terms of communicating the DasEcosystem. The new DasCoin website features the brand vision prominently and the next stage would be to reveal more about the DasCoin board members. “We have been interviewing them, asking them why they believe in the DasEcosystem, what their history is and why we should listen to their opinions and we have some incredible stories from these people. In about two weeks we will start uploading all of these videos so you can understand their motivations, their reasons for being part of DasCoin and why they believe in what they’re doing.” Hand-drawn videos designed by Cognitive Media are designed to be ultra-simple and “the first thing you send to your prospects”. Ed explained: “They should be able to watch this video and say ‘we get everything now’. You should be able to start pulling in those leads superfast. Michael’s Vision Film will be supported by a tool kit – “all the trailers wrapped up and the film itself translated into many different languages and with subtitles, plus instructions on what’s important and how to share it most effectively.” Ed also reflected the importance of the DasPay launch. “We think DasPay has the potential to be one of the biggest ICOs of all time and we are already working with top creators to make sure this lands with a huge, huge bang.”

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